Thread - Nostr Hypermedia

With every argument you keep proving to me that you fundamentally misunderstand what money is, despite having written an entire book on the subject. Bitcoin is not “just a ledger,” as you’ve claimed in the past. Bitcoin is a monetary good, a decentralized payment network, and a censorship-resistant currency all in one. It’s a full-stack monetary system, not a spreadsheet. From economics perspective, money emerges from the market as the most saleable good. Bitcoin fits this because it optimizes for scarcity, verifiability, and portability. Turning the blockchain into a dumpster for arbitrary data directly contradicts these foundational principles. It bloats the system, undermines its monetary utility, and creates financial friction for actual users. Bitcoin *is* the most spam-prone system in the world. That’s the price of having no centralized party to manage or steer usage. And that’s exactly why its culture has always been hostile toward non-monetary use of the blockchain. Every byte of nonsense stuffed into blocks competes with real monetary transactions, increasing fees *unnecessarily*, straining bandwidth, and degrading node accessibility. That is not neutrality, it is misallocation and *abuse*. This isn’t a technical debate, it’s an economic one. Austrian economics warns about malinvestment (capital being misallocated due to distorted incentives). JPEGs, tokens and other data on Bitcoin are a textbook examples of that. They waste block space, misalign incentives, and sabotage the very foundation that gives Bitcoin value: its usability as money and its decentralization. If you make it expensive or difficult to run a node, you centralize validation. Most miners don’t run full nodes or create their own block templates. They outsource that to a handful of mining pools, most of whom are already flirting with KYC and OFAC. You let guys like that dictate consensus and the 21M becomes meaningless. That’s how Bitcoin dies. Not with a bang, but with friction, complexity, creeping node centralization and ruined culture. Your current stance is pure cope. It betrays a deep ignorance of the very economic principles you claim to understand. Bitcoin is money. Everything that weakens its monetary properties weakens the entire value proposition. As a prominent influencer loved by many Bitcoiners you should do better.

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Replies (4)

Crizzo crizzo@nostrplebs.com 7 months ago

I agree with you about some of this, but I just want to point out that the filters are what's causing bandwidth strain because nodes and other miners that aren't aware of certain transactions and have to download them to validate a recently mined block. Bandwidth usage is already limited by block size and blocks are almost always full anyway, so it's not like spam would actually increase the amount of data that needs to be shared every time a block is mined. Having everyone aware of all the transactions available to be mined would reduce latency and keep the network running smoother. As for the rest, I agree that spam is marginally detrimental to the monetary use case, but I also think it will be priced out pretty easily at higher fee rates. My current opinion is that I would like to see fees reach a higher baseline to preemptively price out spam before the filters are dropped, but I do think they should be dropped eventually.

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ESE 7 months ago

Here comes the mop! Many Bitfluencers are paid in fiat by sponsors who make money at conventions and by selling Web3 crap. Is this related somehow?

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Guy Swann theguyswann@iris.to 7 months ago

I read both posts twice and I’m honestly not getting where you think she argued Bitcoin was a generic database, even though that’s the position you seem to be debating. Her claim on the book is that *money* is a ledger system. And it is, but that also isn’t a claim that it’s a generic database. Her logic is going the other direction, not claiming what can or ought to be written on or even what that “ledger” look like, only that successful money is able to behave as a ledger system, both physical and digital forms. I feel like half these comments aren’t responding to the specific content of the original note.

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Chad Lupkes 7 months ago

I think what I find interesting is how people within this community refuse to allow different viewpoints on a subject that is by definition subjective. Instead, we just call each other out as ignorant and insult each other.